North Korea's state-sponsored hacking activities may have helped the government amass as much as $2 billion to help fund its nuclear weapons program, according to a United Nations report.
North Korea's hackers raised the $2 billion partly by looting funds from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges, says a confidential UN report, which has been leaking to press outlets, including Reuters.
Reportedly, a panel of independent experts tasked to oversee the UN-imposed sanctions on North Korea compiled the confidential report. The document was submitted to the UN security council for review last week amid ongoing tensions over North Korea's missile testing.
According to the report, the UN's independent experts are investigating at least 35 reported instances of North Korean hackers attacking financial institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges and mining virtual currencies. The attacks occurred over a four-year span, involving 17 different countries, with the goal of exchanging the stolen funds into foreign currencies.
Security analysts have long suspected North Korean government has been using cyber attacks to help fund itself. The country's nuclear program has triggered both the UN and the US to impose heavy sanctions on North Korea over the years, shutting it out from the world's financial system.
So far, the UN hasn't commented on the confidential report. But the reported conclusions suggest North Korea has been finding lucrative ways to bypass the sanctions by operating in the internet's shadows. In the past, North Korean hackers have been blamed for using email-based phishing attacks to trick employees at cryptocurrency exchanges to download malware to their computers. Security experts also suspect the country's hackers were behind several heists on the SWIFT banking network back in 2016.
Last October, the cybersecurity firm FireEye estimated a specific group of North Korean hackers, dubbed APT 38, had stolen more than $1.1 billion from financial institutions based on the publicly reported heists alone.